Moonshot AI has raised about $2 billion in its latest funding round, signalling growing investor appetite for Chinese startups rivalling Silicon Valley’s leaders.
Food delivery leader Meituan’s venture arm led the round that boosts Moonshot’s valuation to more than $20 billion, according to a statement from financial advisor HF Capital, which advised some of the backers. In April, Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue topped $200 million, driven by subscriptions to its Kimi chatbot and AI model services, the statement said.
A Moonshot spokesperson didn’t respond to messaged requests for comment. A representative with Meituan’s Long-Z Investments confirmed its participation.
The latest fundraising shows Moonshot more than quadrupled its valuation in the span of just a few months, after the Beijing startup raised $500 million at a $4.3 billion valuation toward the end of last year. It raised another $700 million at a $10 billion valuation earlier this year, and then sought an additional $1 billion in funding in an expanded round, Bloomberg News reported.
Investors are piling into an elite group of Chinese AI upstarts vying with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC to develop world-class services. DeepSeek is in the process of raising external capital for the first time, drawing interest from state investors at a valuation of as much as $50 billion. In public markets, Moonshot peers MiniMax and Zhipu AI have surged to valuations of more than $30 billion since their stellar debuts in Hong Kong in January.
Moonshot was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor who previously worked at Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The company sells tiered subscription plans for its chatbot and offers its underlying technology to enterprise clients.
Food delivery leader Meituan’s venture arm led the round that boosts Moonshot’s valuation to more than $20 billion, according to a statement from financial advisor HF Capital, which advised some of the backers. In April, Moonshot’s annual recurring revenue topped $200 million, driven by subscriptions to its Kimi chatbot and AI model services, the statement said.
A Moonshot spokesperson didn’t respond to messaged requests for comment. A representative with Meituan’s Long-Z Investments confirmed its participation.
The latest fundraising shows Moonshot more than quadrupled its valuation in the span of just a few months, after the Beijing startup raised $500 million at a $4.3 billion valuation toward the end of last year. It raised another $700 million at a $10 billion valuation earlier this year, and then sought an additional $1 billion in funding in an expanded round, Bloomberg News reported.
Investors are piling into an elite group of Chinese AI upstarts vying with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC to develop world-class services. DeepSeek is in the process of raising external capital for the first time, drawing interest from state investors at a valuation of as much as $50 billion. In public markets, Moonshot peers MiniMax and Zhipu AI have surged to valuations of more than $30 billion since their stellar debuts in Hong Kong in January.
Moonshot was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former Tsinghua University professor who previously worked at Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The company sells tiered subscription plans for its chatbot and offers its underlying technology to enterprise clients.
